


Kaleidoscope

by heartsung



Category: Fae Tales - not_poignant
Genre: Angst, Battle, Character Study, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 06:43:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15925019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartsung/pseuds/heartsung
Summary: Gwyn's world was a kaleidoscope.Gwyn's first battle: an introspection.





	Kaleidoscope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [not_poignant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_poignant/gifts).



> The first and last sentences of this little ... thing popped into my head a couple of weeks ago and wouldn't leave me alone whenever I went to sleep, so I ... caved. And here it is, out of my system, for your enjoyment. (This is the first ficlet I've attempted in 2+ years. It really, really wouldn't let me go.)

Gwyn’s world was a kaleidoscope. There was nothing except red, white, grey and black – and the muddy, glaring in-betweens. Red, grey and black surrounded him in the flashes of metal against metal, in the moments before an arrow found a target, in the bodies on the ground (that he’d put there), beneath his feet as he made his way forward, unerringly, towards their opponents’ commander, determined to kill them.

But the whiteness grew from inside him. It was starbursts behind his eyes whenever he drew blood, it was the way he bared his teeth at the sounds of dying Unseelie all around him, and the racing-yet-steady pace of his heart as he defended himself, then retaliated, then won another tiny, massive fight within the small, insignificant battle. He felt frenzied, unhinged, yet at the same time, everything was oddly clear to him. The way his light was trying to rise up beneath his skin, break out of him in waves that he knew, he _knew_ , would obliterate everyone and everything around him in the time it’d take for him to draw a single breath. The way the Unseelie militia they were up against moved, their drills and strategies ingrained into his mind through years of studying. Their own strategies, his companions’ bodies, close by one moment and spreading out the next, following the same plan as he was. It wasn’t a feeling he could name yet, although he would try, later. In his memories, it would tie itself into his bloodlust, the red-and-white inside him.

He didn’t expect to see the end of the battle, really. A part of him had _known_ he wouldn’t, even before he’d met with his father’s soldiers, before they’d set out to fight Unseelie. When they’d been sitting around the night before, there had been a fluttering in his heart, close to his core but not inside it. It hadn’t come from his light, or his education, but from _him_ , and it had urged him to leave, go away, into the woods that surrounded them, and not come back. That urge in itself hadn’t been new or unfamiliar to Gwyn, but the certainty that if he stayed, this would be his last night alive … had. And yet, he hadn’t given in to the part of him that wanted to hide, be with the animals of the forest, disappear. He’d stayed, and he’d pretended to be thinking about the battle ahead more than he truly had been, when someone had asked about the far-off look in his eyes.

 

And then it was over. The kaleidoscope inside his mind slowed down, came to a halt, faded – all of it except the white-red-white caused by his light –, and Gwyn was left standing in the middle of the battlefield that had once been untouched nature, chest heaving, eyes wild … and _alive_. He looked around, noticed his fellow soldiers around him, most of them alive, a good few injured, and victorious. There was a part of him, the wild part that had wanted to run, that couldn’t quite believe it, that had him whipping his head from side to side in disbelief as his hair, matted down with reddish brown and murky grey-black, stuck to his head in damp approximations of his usual curls. He found his companions – his father’s men – again, before his gaze shifted to the backs of the few Unseelie that were still moving, retreating quickly, then down to the dead that littered the ground like cast-aside toys, broken and devoid of any spark. He could _feel_ their deadness, deep down.

Something heavy lurched inside him, shifted, shattered, stopped.

Maybe, this time, his father would be proud.


End file.
